Stargazing
by Emmeebee
Summary: Unable to sleep due to restlessness, Draco goes to the Astronomy Tower to play a childhood wishing game and, in the process, realises that he no longer knows what he wants. Set between January and June 1998.


The cold hard stone was a poor substitute for his mattress, but it ranked low in Draco's mind as he stared up at the clear night sky from his vantage point atop the Astronomy Tower, searching for his namesake constellation. Although he hadn't indulged in this childhood fantasy for over a decade, he still had a habit of idly identifying it every Astronomy class, so it didn't take him long to locate where it shone in the sky.

His aunt, Andromeda, had visited his mother one night years ago when his father was otherwise occupied with business. Draco had been sworn to secrecy on the matter and, not yet at the stage where he ran to his father for morsels of power, he had always kept his word. Seeing the seven-year-old boy staring up at the sky, eyes squinting as he tried to make out the constellations that his mother was making him learn, she'd taught him this trick. He'd kept at it for a few years, wishing that his father would no longer be so aloof or his mother so unhappy, until he'd realised that wishes either took too long to be of any use to him or didn't have real magic in the first place. Neither possibility was acceptable. Still, something drew him there that night, some impulse that led him to sneak out of the castle and fly up to the top of the tallest tower so that he could have an unimpeded view of the stars dotting the sky above him. He was more conflicted than he had ever been and he supposed that a shot in the dark didn't look quite so pointless when all else had failed; at the very least it gave him an alternative to lying in bed staring up at the cracks in the stone ceiling and trying to imagine the castle just coming down above him and negating the whole problem.

So he wished upon the star, upon his constellation of stars actually. It was near the end of his final year of school and he knew a war was coming. He wasn't sure when it would erupt, but it was simmering in wait, ready to boil over with the slightest provocation. It couldn't be long until something snapped in the delicate balance of things and spells were fired. And his family and friends were all right in the middle of it. He knew that not everybody would make it out alive if it did come down to a war. Chances were he wouldn't. He had always talked big about mudbloods, but back then it'd just been an effective insult that had the added benefit of proving how tough he was. He hadn't liked them, still didn't. They were filthy and disgusting and primitive. They threw their excrement on the streets that they then walked, they died in droves of infections and plagues that they were unable to comprehend and those who they had elevated to the status of nobility wasted time speaking in stinted and unnecessarily lengthy rhyming ways instead of actually trying to make any progress. It was no wonder they could tell when a child was magical, given how the mudbloods in Draco's year were cringe worthy but bearable, although Draco didn't understand why they shunned or killed them rather than heralding them as beacons of the hope for improvement and decency. But, regardless of this, he didn't want a war. He'd joined the Death Eaters to protect his father, talked big to his peers, flaunted his hatred around the school since he first arrived there, but he didn't want a war. He didn't want people to actually die, whether he'd known them or not. He wasn't sure whether he'd always thought that way or if it had changed after seeing his classmates tortured in detention and his little cousin, aloof and crazy as always, holed up in the dungeons that he had never thought he would live to see again be used to hold political prisoners, but he supposed that it was a mixture. He'd never minded the idea of Granger being hurt or a Weasley mocked, but now the childhood games were getting all too real and he was starting to realise the full, deadly extent of it. And it terrified him more than he would ever care to admit.

So he wished upon Draco as his runaway aunt had taught him. He wished that his family, his friends, his classmates, even mudbloods and blood traitors like Granger and Potter, would make it through. He didn't want them around, but he didn't want them dead either. He didn't know what that left him wanting, but he knew that it was important that he know. Unfortunately, he supposed it wouldn't make much of a difference. There would be a war. His namesake constellation, regardless of his aunt's assurances, wouldn't help with that. And he'd fight for the Dark Lord, fight for Death, because if you don't fight for something you fight against it, and he didn't want Death to find him. He didn't want the other side dead, but he didn't want his family dead even more.


End file.
